Cloud Cuckoo Land (23 page)

1953–1970

T
he bus drops him at the Texaco. Mrs. Boydstun stands outside smoking a cigarette and leaning against her Buick.

“So skinny. You get my letters?”

“You sent some?”

“First of the month, rain or shine.”

“What'd they say?”

She shrugs. “New stoplight. Stibnite mine closed.”

Her hair is neat and her eyes are bright but when she walks toward the diner he notices something off: one leg is a half second slower than it should be.

“It's nothing,” she says. “My dad had the same. Look: your dog died. I gave her to Charlie Goss in New Meadows. He said she went easy.”

Athena drowsing by the library fire. He's too exhausted to cry. “She was old.”

“She was.”

They sit in a booth and order eggs and Mrs. Boydstun lights a second cigarette. The waitress wears lunettes on a chain around her neck. Her apron is shockingly white. She says, “They brainwash you? They're saying some of you boys went and became turncoats.”

Mrs. Boydstun taps her cigarette into the ashtray. “Just bring the coffee, Helen.”

Knives of sunlight flash off the lake. Boats motor back and forth, unzipping the water. At the service station a shirtless man with a deep tan watches an attendant pump gas into his Cadillac. Impossible that such things have been going on all these months.

Mrs. Boydstun watches him. He understands that people will want to hear something, but not the truth: they'll want a story of perseverance and pluck, good overcoming evil, a homecoming song about a hero who brought light into dark places. Beside him the waitress is clearing a table: three of the plates still have food on them.

Mrs. Boydstun says, “You kill anybody over there?”

“No.”

“Not a one?”

The eggs come sunny-side up. He pierces one with the tines of his fork and the yolk bleeds out, glistening obscenely.

“That's good,” she says. “That's for the best.”

The house is the same: the ceramic children, a Jesus suffering on every wall. The same mulberry curtains, the same junipers beneath which Athena crawled on the coldest nights. Mrs. Boydstun pours a drink.

“Cribbage, honey?”

“I think I'll lie down.”

“Of course. You take your time.”

In the dresser drawer the Playwood Plastic soldiers slumber in their tin box. Soldier 401 marches uphill with his rifle. Soldier 410 kneels behind his anti-tank gun. He gets into the same brass bed he slept in as a boy but the mattress is too soft and the day keeps getting brighter. Eventually he hears Mrs. Boydstun go out and he creeps down the stairs and unlatches every door in the house. He needs them unlocked at the least, open at best. Then he tiptoes into the kitchen, finds a loaf of bread, tears it in half, puts one half beneath his pillow, and divides the other between his pockets. Just in case.

He sleeps on the floor beside the bed. He is not quite twenty years old.

Pastor White gets him a job with the county highway department. In the golden days of fall, tamaracks blazing yellow on the mountainsides, Zeno works with a road crew of older men pulling a motor grader with a Caterpillar RD6 crawler, filling in mud holes or graveling
over washouts, improving the roads to the even smaller towns that lie even deeper in the mountains. When winter arrives, he requests the most solitary job on offer: driving an old hardtop army Autocar rotary snowplow. Its three big spiral blades send snow over the windshield in a kind of reverse avalanche—a skyward spout that, over the course of a night, illuminated by the glow of the headlights, tends to hypnotize him. It's a strange and lonely business: the wipers generally do little more than smear frost across the glass, and the heater works about twenty percent of the time, and the defroster is a caged fan mounted on the dashboard, and he has to drive with one hand on the wheel and the other holding a rag soaked in spirits, wiping the inside of the glass to keep it clear.

Every Sunday he sends a letter to a British veterans organization, seeking the whereabouts of a lance corporal named Rex Browning.

Time passes. The snow melts, falls again, a sawmill burns, is rebuilt again, the highway crew rocks over washouts, shores up bridges, and rain or rockfall washes them out, and they rebuild them again. Then it's winter and the rotary plow throws its mesmeric curtain of snow over the truck cab. Cars are always freezing up or going off the roads, sliding into the slush or mud, and he's always hauling them back up: chain, tackle, reverse.

Things occasionally go haywire with Mrs. Boydstun. Her moods seesaw. She forgets what she is supposed to buy at the store. She trips over nothing; she tries to put on lipstick but trails it back along one cheek. In the summer of 1955, Zeno drives her to Boise and a doctor diagnoses her with Huntington's chorea. The doctor tells him to watch for slips in her speech or for involuntary jerking movements. Mrs. Boydstun lights a cigarette and says, “You watch your mouth.”

He writes to the British Commonwealth Forces Korea. He writes to a recovery unit at the British Commonwealth Occupation Force. He writes to every person named Rex Browning in England. What
replies come back are conscientious but inconclusive. Prisoner of war, no known status, we regret we have no further information at this time. Rex's unit? He doesn't know. Commanding officer? He doesn't know. He has a name. He has East London. He wants to write: He fluttered his hand over his mouth when he yawned. He had a collarbone I wanted to put my teeth on. He told me that archaeologists have found the inscription
ΚΑΛΟΣΟΠΑΙΣ
scratched on thousands of ancient Greek pots, given as gifts by older men to boys they found attractive.
ΚΑΛΟΣΟΠΑΙΣ
,
καλός ὁ παῖς
, “the boy is beautiful.”

How could a man with so much in his head, with so much energy and light, be erased?

A half-dozen times over the coming winters, he's leaning over a frozen engine out on the Long Valley Road, or unhooking a chain, when a man will brush his elbow, or fit a hand into the space between his bottom rib and the crest of his pelvis, and they'll go into a garage or climb into the cab of the Autocar in the foggy dark and grapple each other. One particular ranch hand contrives to make this happen several times, as though deliberately driving his car into a snowbank. But by spring the man is gone with no word, and Zeno never sees him again.

Amanda Corddry, the highway department dispatcher, asks him about various girls in town—how about Jessica from the Shell station? Lizzie at the diner?—and he cannot avoid a date. He wears a necktie; the women are unfailingly nice; some have been warned about the supposed perfidy of indoctrinated POWs in Korea; none understand his long silences. He tries to use his fork and knife in a masculine way, cross his legs in a masculine way; he talks about baseball and boat engines; still he suspects he does everything wrong.

One night, waves of confusion crashing over him, he almost tells Mrs. Boydstun. She's having a good day, her hair brushed and her eyes clear, two loaves of raisin bread in the oven, and it's a commercial break on the television, Quaker Instant Oatmeal, then Vanquish headache medicine, and Zeno clears his throat.

“You know, after Papa died, when I—”

She gets up and turns down the volume. Silence blares in the room as bright as a sun.

“I'm not—” he tries again, and she shuts her eyes, as though bracing for a blow. In front of him a jeep tears in half. Gun barrels flash. Blewitt swats flies and collects them in a tin. Men scrape carbonized corn from the bottom of a pot.

“Spit it out, Zeno.”

“It's nothing. Your program is back on now.”

The doctor suggests jigsaw puzzles to maintain Mrs. Boydstun's fine-motor skills, so he orders a new one every week from Lakeport Drug, and becomes accustomed to finding the little pieces all over the house: in the basins of sinks, stuck to the bottom of his shoe, in the dustpan when he sweeps the kitchen. A splotch of cloud, a segment of the
Titanic
's smokestack, a section of a cowboy's bandanna. Inside a terror creeps: that things will be like this forever, that this will be all there ever is. Breakfast, work, supper, dishes, a half-completed jigsaw of the Hollywood sign on the dining table, forty of its pieces on the floor. Life. Then the cold dark.

Traffic increases on the road up from Boise, and most of the county plowing shifts to night. He pursues the beams of his headlights through the dark, beating back the snow, and some mornings, at the end of his shift, rather than go directly home, he parks in front of the library and lingers between the shelves.

There's a new librarian now, Mrs. Raney, who mostly lets him be. At first Zeno sticks to
National Geographic
magazines: macaws, Inuits, camel trains, the photographs stirring some latent restlessness inside. He inches his way into History: the Phoenicians, the Sumerians, the Jōmon period of Japan. He drifts past the little collection of Greeks and Romans—the
Iliad
, a few plays by Sophocles, no sign of a lemon-yellow copy of
The Odyssey
—but cannot bring himself to pull anything off the shelf.

Occasionally he gathers the courage to share tidbits of what he has read with Mrs. Boydstun: ostrich hunting in ancient Libya, tomb
painting in Tarquinia. “The Mycenaeans revered spirals,” he says one night. “They painted them on wine cups and masonry and gravestones, on the armored breastplates of their kings. But no one knows why.”

From Mrs. Boydstun's nostrils gush twin columns of smoke. She sets down her glass of Old Forester and pokes through her puzzle pieces. “Why,” she says, “would anyone ever want to know about that?”

Out the kitchen window curtains of snow blow through the dusk.

21 December, 1970

Dear Zeno,

What an absolute miracle to receive three letters from you all at once. The bureau must have misfiled them for years. I can't tell you how glad I am that you made it out. I searched for reports on the releases from the camp, but as you know, so much of that was buried, and I was working on reorienting myself to the living. I am elated that you found me.

I'm still mucking about with ancient texts—rummaging in the dusty bones of the dead languages like the old classics master I didn't want to become. It's even worse now, if you can believe it. I study lost books, books that no longer exist, examining papyri dug out of rubbish mounds at Oxyrhynchus. Even been to Egypt. Appalling sunburn.

Years pass in a blink now. Hillary and I will be hosting a bit of a function for my birthday in May. I know it's a terribly long way, but you could pay a visit if you're able? A holiday of sorts. We could scribble some Greek with paper and pen rather than stick and mud. Whatever you decide, I remain,

Your trusty friend,

Rex

2016–2018

E
ighth-grade world studies:

Write three things you learned about the Aztecs.

In the library I learned that every 52 years Aztec priests had to stop the world from ending. They put out every torch in town and locked all the pregnant women in stone grainerys so their babies didn't turn into demons and kept all the kids awake so they wouldn't turn into mice. Then they took a victim (had to be a victim with zero sins) to the top of a sacred mountain called Thorn Tree Place and when certain stars (one book, NonFiction F1219.73, guessed maybe Vega, fifth brightest in the sky) passed overhead, one priest split open the prisoner's chest and ripped out her hot wet heart while another started a fire with a drill where her heart used to be. Then they carried the burning heart fire down to the city in a bowl and lit torches with it and people wanted to burn themselves with the torches because to get burnt by the heart fire was lucky. Soon thousands of torches were lit with that one fire and the city glowed again and the world was saved for another 52 years.

Ninth-grade U.S. history:

Not to hurt feelings but that chapter you assigned? That was all “Columbus is great,” “The Indians sure loved Thanksgiving,” “Let's brainwash everyone.” I found way better stuff at the library, for example did you know before leaving England to pick up the tobacco the slaves grew, the Englishers filled their empty ships with mud so they didn't tip in storms? When they got to the New World (which was not new or called America, the America name came from a pickle seller guy who got famous because he lied about doing sex with natives) the Englishers dumped their mud on shore to make room for the tobacco. Guess what was in that mud? Earthworms. But earthworms had been extinct in America since the ice ages, like 10,000 years at least, so the English worms went EVERYwhere and changed the soils and the Englishers also brought other things this place had NEVER known such as: silkworms pigs dandelions grapevines goats rats measles pox and the belief that all animals and plants were put here for humans to kill and eat. There weren't honeybees in so-called America either, so the new bees had no competiters and spread fast. One book said when families in the native kingdoms saw honeybees they cried because they knew dying wasn't far behind.

Tenth-grade English:

You said write something “fun” we did over summer to get our “grammer mussels flexing” again, so ok, Mrs Tweedy, this summer scientists announced that in the last 40 yrs humans have killed 60 percent of the wild mammals and fishes and birds on earth. Is that fun? Also in the past 30 yrs, we melted 95 percent of the oldest
thickest ice in the arctic. When we have melted all the ice in Greenland, just the ice in Greenland, not the north pole, not Alaska, just Greenland, Mrs Tweedy, know what happens? The oceans rise 23 feet. That drowns Miami, New York, London, and Shanghai, that's like hop on the boat with your grandkids, Mrs Tweedy, and you're like, do you want some snacks, and they're like, Grandma, look underwater, there's the statute of liberty, there's Big Ben, there's the dead people. Is that fun, are my grammer mussels flexing?

A bumper sticker on Mrs. Tweedy's desk says,
The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense
. Her hair looks soft enough to sleep on. Seymour is expecting a reprimand; instead she says that the Environmental Awareness Club at Lakeport High went defunct a couple of years ago and how would Seymour feel about reviving it?

Out the windows, September light bends over the football field. At fifteen he's old enough to understand that it's not only his state of fatherlessness or his thrift store jeans or that he has to swallow sixty milligrams of buspirone every morning to keep the roar at bay: his differences run deeper. Other tenth-grade boys hunt elk or shoplift Red Bulls from Jacksons or smoke weed at the ski hill or cooperate in online battle squads. Seymour studies the quantities of methane locked in melting Siberian permafrost. Reading about declining owl populations led him to deforestation which led to soil erosion which led to ocean pollution which led to coral bleaching, everything warming, melting, and dying faster than scientists predicted, every system on the planet connected by countless invisible threads to every other: cricket players in Delhi vomiting from Chinese air pollution, Indonesian peat fires pushing billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere over California, million-acre bushfires in Australia turning what's left of New Zealand's glaciers pink. A warmer planet = more water vapor in the atmosphere = even warmer planet = more water vapor = warmer planet still = thawing permafrost =
more carbon and methane trapped in that permafrost releasing into the atmosphere = more heat = less permafrost = less polar ice to reflect the sun's energy, and all this evidence, all these studies are sitting there in the library for anybody to find, but as far as Seymour can tell, he's the only one looking.

Some nights, Eden's Gate glowing beyond his bedroom curtain, he can almost hear dozens of colossal feedback loops churning all over the planet, rasping and grinding like great invisible millwheels in the sky.

Mrs. Tweedy taps the eraser of her pencil against her desk. “Hello? Earth to Seymour?”

He draws a tsunami rearing over a city. Stick-people run from doorways, throw themselves from windows. He prints
ENVIRO-AWARENESS CLUB, TUESDAY, BREAK, ROOM 114
across the top and
TOO LATE TO WAKE UP, ASSHOLES?
across the bottom and Mrs. Tweedy tells him to erase
ASSHOLES
before she'll make copies on the faculty copier.

The following Tuesday, eight kids show up. Seymour stands in front of the desks and reads from a crumpled sheet of notebook paper. “Movies make you think civilization will end fast, like with aliens and explosions, but really it'll end slow. Ours is already ending, it's just ending too slow for people to notice. We've already killed most of the animals, and heated up the oceans, and brought carbon levels in the atmosphere to the highest point in eight hundred thousand years. Even if we stopped everything right now, like we all die today at lunch—no more cars, no more militaries, no more burgers—it'll keep getting hotter for centuries. By the time we're twenty-five? The amount of carbon in the air will have doubled again, which means hotter fires, bigger storms, worse floods. Corn, for example, won't grow as well ten years from now. Ninety-five percent of what cows and chickens eat is guess what? Corn. So meat will be more expensive. Also when there's more carbon in the air? Humans can't think as clearly. So when we're twenty-five, there will
be way more hungry, scared, confused people stuck in traffic fleeing flooded or burning cities. Do you think we're gonna sit in our cars solving climate problems then? Or are we gonna fist-fight and rape and eat each other?”

A junior girl says, “Did you just say rape and eat each other?”

A senior boy holds up a sheet of paper that says
See-More Stool-Guy
. Ha ha hilarity everywhere.

From the back Mrs. Tweedy says, “Those are some alarming predictions, Seymour, but maybe we could discuss a few steps we could take toward living more sustainably? Some actionable items within reach of a high school club?”

A sophomore named Janet wonders if they couldn't ban plastic straws from the cafeteria and also give away reusable water bottles with the Lakeport Lion on them? They could also put, like, better posters over the recycling bins? Janet has frog patches sewn on her jean jacket and shiny black raven eyes and the ghost of a mustache on her upper lip and Seymour stands in front of the blackboard with his scrunched-up paper and the bell rings and Mrs. Tweedy says, “Next Tuesday, everybody, we'll brainstorm more ideas,” and Seymour heads to biology.

He's walking home from school later that day when a green Audi pulls up beside him and Janet rolls down the window. Her braces are pink and her eyes are a mix of blue and black and she has been to Seattle, Sacramento, and Park City, Utah, which was wild, they went river rafting and rock climbing and saw a porcupine climb a tree, has Seymour ever seen a porcupine?

She offers to drive him home. Thirty-three units are in Eden's Gate now, lining both sides of Arcady Lane, zigzagging up the hillside behind the double-wide. Mostly people from Boise, Portland, and eastern Oregon use them as vacation homes: they park boat trailers in the cul-de-sacs and drive twenty-thousand-dollar UTVs to town and hang college football flags from their balconies and on weekend nights they stand around backyard firepits laughing and
urinating into the huckleberries while their kids shoot Roman candles into the stars.

“Wow,” says Janet, “you have a lot of weeds in your yard.”

“The neighbors complain about it.”

“I like it,” says Janet. “Natural.”

They sit on the front step and sip Shasta Twists and watch bumblebees drift between the thistles. Janet smells like fabric softener and cafeteria tacos and says fifty words for every one of Seymour's, talking about Key Club, summer camp, how she wants to go to college somewhere far from her parents but not too far, you know—as though her future were a pre-plotted exponential curve arcing ever higher—and a white-haired retiree who lives in the town house next door rolls his fifty-gallon trash bin to the end of his driveway and looks at them and Janet raises a hand in greeting and the man goes inside.

“He hates us. Everyone hopes my mom will sell so they can put in new houses.”

“Seemed nice enough to me,” says Janet, and responds to a warble from her smartphone.

Seymour looks at his shoes. “Did you know that every day internet data storage emits as much carbon as all the airplanes in the world combined?”

“You're weird,” she says, but smiles when she says it. In the last breath before dark a black bear materializes from the twilight and Janet clutches his arm and takes a video as it sashays between the pools of streetlight. It moves between the half-dozen wheeled trash carts standing at the ends of the Eden's Gate driveways, sniffing sniffing. Eventually it finds a can it likes, raises one paw, and swats it to the ground. Carefully, with a single claw, the bear drags a plump white bag out of the can's mouth and scatters its contents across the asphalt.